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“US
interventionist foreign policy has created a climate of lawlessness and fear,
forcing families and now children to flee for their lives.”

Eugene Stovall
Oakland, California July 22, 2014

In 1954, the CIA orchestrated a coup d'état in Guatemala to
overthrow President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman at the behest of the United Fruit
Company.

Rockets and tracer bullets aimed at General Noriega's nearby
military headquarters set fire to some houses. The general's men, unhappy that
the barrio did not back their ruler, set fire to others. Some 3,000 residents
fled the El Chorrillo District as the American military obliterated Panama’s
poorest neighborhood.

Obama’s administration sanctioned the coup d’etat against the
democratically-elected president, Manuel Zelaya, in Honduras. Violence and
anarchy wrack the two successive U.S-backed regimes.

The Atlacatl Battalion, organized at the US Army School of
the Americas, occupies the village of El Mozote and massacres a thousand
unarmed Salvadoran civilians. The Atlacatl field commander kills the children
because he claims that they would just grow up to become guerrillas, if he let
them live.

European Americans whine about the security of their borders, as children, victims of ongoing
US-sponsored terrorism, violence and hunger, flee Central America. Possibly the
neo-cons and their ‘liberal’ supporters would feel safer if they could see the
corpses of ten and twelve year olds strewn on the shores of the Rio Grande as
the Jews in Israel have done to the children in Gaza.

The migration of children from Central America did not begin
last month. Generations of children and adults have been fleeing Latin America
where ruthless greed and genocidal militarism that are the legacy of ‘yankee’ imperialism in ‘banana’ republics. The
major media outlets and political spokesman begin their campaign of ‘whining’
about their ill-gotten gains whenever the graduates from the Goebbels school of
broadcasting need to run out another propaganda campaign. In this case, the
propaganda is how threatened European Americans feel by the victims of American
fascism.

Pope Francis says, “This humanitarian emergency requires, as
a first urgent measure, these children be welcomed and protected.” But here in
the United States, the emergency is
widely described as a “border crisis.”
The reality is that the US is experiencing a profound failure of its plans for
economic globalization and a blowback on U.S. foreign policies of American
exceptionalism, preemptive war and regime change. The tens of thousands of
children crossing the border from Mexico into the United States, unaccompanied
by adults, after making perilous journeys of thousands of miles, often riding
atop freight trains that are controlled by gangs, seek asylum from the horrors
of US-sanctioned terrorism. Some of these children hope to be reunited with
parents in the U.S. Other children are sent away by their parents to save them
from the epidemic violence of their hometowns, places like San Pedro Sula, the
economic center of Honduras, which bears the distinction of being the murder
capital of the world.

A historical understanding of US foreign policy in Central
America helps explain why this wave of unaccompanied minors is pouring in from Panama,
Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. No description of the US interventionist
policies that decimated the economies of these countries and created a climate
of lawlessness and fear could fail to explain what is forcing families and
their children to flee for their lives. Above all, no description of the
activities of the United Fruit Company could leave anyone guessing about the
real objectives of US foreign policy.

United Fruit Company

In 1954, the CIA orchestrated a coup d'état to overthrow
Jacobo Árbenz Guzman, only the second democratically elected president in Guatemala’s
history. The United Fruit Company ordered the coup. President Guzman defeated
his nearest challenger, by a margin of over 50% in the 1951 presidential
elections. Upon taking office, President Guzman initiated a number of social
reforms including the expansion of suffrage and educational opportunities. But
his agrarian reform law granting arable land to poverty stricken peasants caused
him to run afoul of the Unitied Fruit Company. With little more than a memo to
its employees, the United Fruit Company ordered the Eisenhower administration
to institute regime change in Guatemala and the CIA engineered a coup d’etat.

Eisenhower’s Secretary of State,
John Foster Dulles, was a principal in the law
firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. The United Fruit
Company was a client of Sullivan & Cromwell. John Foster Dulles as well as
his brother, Allen Dulles, sat on the board of the United Fruit Company. In the
late 1930s, John Foster Dulles was fully occupied in internal affairs of Guatemala
and Honduras negotiating land giveaways for the United Fruit Company. John
Foster Dulles's brother, Allen Dulles, also did legal work for United Fruit while
sitting on its board of directors. Allen Dulles was the Director of the CIA
under Eisenhower. John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles orchestrated the
overthrow of President Guzman to protect the United Fruit Company’s Guatemalan
land interests. At the time of the coup, the Dulles brothers and the law firm
of Sullivan & Cromwell had been on the payroll and owned substantial shares
of stock in the United Fruit Company for thirty-eight years.

The Dulles Brothers were not the only members of the
Eisenhower administration connected to the United Fruit Company. John Moors
Cabot served both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations as the Assistant
Secretary of State for InterAmerican Affairs. Cabot’s brother was president of the
United Fruit Company. Ed Whitman, was the United Fruit Company’s principal
lobbyist. Whitman’s wife was Ann C. Whitman, President Eisenhower's personal
secretary. Henry Cabot Lodge, America's ambassador to the UN, was one of the
principal owners of the United Fruit Company stock.

In 1901, some of the leading families in Boston known as the
Boston Brahmins, who owned plantations,
railroads and steamships throughout the Caribbean, formed the United Fruit
Company. In 1913, the United Fruit Company branched out and created the
Tropical Radio and Telegraph Company. The Boston-based company formed its fruit
distribution monopoly by coercing tax breaks and other benefits from the host
governments that the United Fruit Company controlled. The company built
extensive railroads and ports throughout Central America, but these facilities
were used solely for its own use. The company even created numerous private schools
for the children of its employees. Its investments were meant to keep the
populations in Central America poor, ignorant and dependent.

The United Fruit Company dominated its markets by controlling
land distribution in the countries where its plantations were located. Claiming
that hurricanes, blight and other natural threats required them to hold large reserves
of land, the United Fruit Company prevented
governments from distributing lands that it controlled by did not use. The United
Fruit Company manipulated land use rights in Central American countries in a
number of ways. The company prevented vast tracts of land from being cultivated
or from being transferred to landless peasants. In Guatemala and elsewhere, the
company prevented the government from building roads. The company was so determined
to maintain its profitable transportation monopoly over its railroads and ships
that it aggressively prevented them from being used either as public
conveyances or for the transportation of goods in any of the Central American
countries where they operated. At least once, when the company closed down one
of its plantations, the United Fruit Company dug up the railroad tracks and destroyed
the switching yards and other railroad facilities serving that location.

The United Fruit Company acquired its excessive Central
American land holdings through bribes, blackmail and intimidation. With the
power of the United States government behind it, the United Fruit Company
ruthlessly plundered Central American resources and tyrannized its people. The legacy ‘yankee imperialism’ is the basis
of US foreign policy towards Panama, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala to the
present day.

Panama

El Chorrillo is on the water's edge in Panama City, not far
from the entrance to the Panama Canal. Many of the canal's builders --
immigrants from the Caribbean – and their families lived here. The neighborhood
was poor and dangerous, home to teachers and clerks, as well as hustlers who
sold contraband cigarettes or beer stolen from the American military bases. On
Dec. 20, 1989, El Chorrillo was reduced to smoky rubble in the chaotic hours
from midnight to dawn when invading American troops stormed through the
district, supposedly searching for
Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega. Hundreds of civilians died in fires lit by
American soldiers. Rockets and tracer bullets aimed at General Noriega's nearby
military headquarters burned their houses to the ground. The general's men,
unhappy that the barrio did not back Noriega, set fire to other homes. American
troops incarcerated 3,000 refugees from El Chorrillo in a sports field. For
months Panama’s poor and dispossessed were held in the sports field, incommunicado.

Some of the refugees petitioned the Organization of American
States to persuade the Panamanian government and the United States to provide a
$30,000 payment for each homeless family. The Panamanian police used tear gas
to stop them from demonstrating. Many were arrested and imprisoned.

As U.S. troops were beginning their assault, the Bush
administration swore in Panama’s new government. President Guillermo Endara had
won a popular vote the previous May. However, Noriega’s electoral commission
annulled their victory. It was revealed that the Bush administration had
covertly poured $10 million into Endara’s campaign. It was also discovered that
the wealthy Panamanian businessman arrested in Georgia on cocaine conspiracy
and money laundering charges was a CIA bagman and a close friend of Endara,
Panama’s presidential candidate. A Panamanian newspaper trumpeted the headline,
“Cocaine Cash Pays for the Opposition Campaign.”

After his invasion, Bush gives Panama $200 million in aid.
None of the money went to the stricken Panamanians; rather it paid for damages suffered
by foreign companies during the American invasion.

Panama’s economic misery and the government’s severely
limited resources stimulated a resurgence of drug trafficking. In 2010 the New
York Times reported that illegal drug shipments through the rough Panamanian
hinterlands and through the capital are, if anything, more open and abundant
than before Noriega’s overthrow.

El Salvador

On January 16, 1991, President Bush gave $42.5 million to
the Salvadoran armed forces despite the decade-long genocidal campaign that
Salvadoran government was waging against its own people. Mostly killing
peasants, El Salvador readily killed any political opponent — nuns, priests, a
bishop, church lay workers, political activists, journalists, labor unionists,
medical workers, students, teachers, human-rights monitors. El Salvador used its
security forces, the Army, the National Guard, and the Treasury Police to carry
out its merciless campaign of terrorism. But the Salvadoran government and its
US advisors also created paramilitary death squads.
Cynthia Arnson, a Latin American-affairs writer for Human Rights Watch, says
that the objective of death-squad-terror was not just to eliminate political opposition,
but also, to torture and disfigure the bodies of their victims so as to
terrorize the population. In the mid-1980s, s the Salvadoran government began
to use US arms to initiate a campaign of indiscriminate bombing, planting of
anti-personnel mines in populated areas and the harassment of national and
international medical personnel treating victims of the government’s terror
campaign.

El Salvador began its campaign of genocide on 28 February
1977. A crowd of political demonstrators
gathered in downtown San Salvador to protest the fraudulent election
of Carlos Humberto Romero. Security forces arrived on the scene and opened
fire, indiscriminately killing demonstrators and bystanders alike. Estimates of
the number of civilians killed range between 200 and 1,500. Government
repression continued even after the US-sponsored Romero was inaugurated
president. Romero implemented state-of-siege declarations and suspended civil
liberties. Acting on the advice of his US military advisors, Romero
regularly abducts, tortures and kills his civilian opponents. By the end of
1978, Romero had killed 687 civilians. In 1979, he kills 1,796. In 1980, the
Salvadoran Army and three Salvadoran security forces kill 11,895 peasants,
trade unionists, teachers, students, journalists, human rights advocates,
priests, and other anti-government activists.

Romero deployed the Atlacatl Battalion, organized at the US
Army School of the Americas, in El Salvador as a ‘death squad.’ When the battalion
occupies the village of El Mozote, the US trained ‘death squad’ massacres a
thousand unarmed civilians. The field commander said he wsd under orders to
kill everyone, including the children. He asserted that the children would just
grow up to become guerrillas if he let them live.

In 1979, the outgoing Carter administration gave the
Salvadoran armed forces $10 million including $5 million in rifles, ammunition,
grenades and helicopters. In its effort to defeat the insurgency, the Salvadoran Armed Forces carried out a
"scorched earth" strategy adopting tactics similar to those being
employed by the counterinsurgency in neighboring Guatemala. These tactics where primarily
derived and adapted from U.S. strategy during the Vietnam War,
and taught by American military advisors attached to the Salvadoran military. Beginning
in 1983, U.S. reconnaissance planes uncovered guerrilla strongholds and relayed
the information to the Salvadoran military. American involvement in the use of
terror tactics — bombings, strafings, shellings and, occasionally, massacres of civilians
accounted for the killing of 8,000 civilians a year. American advisors assisted
in conducting the overall campaign of targeted executions and indiscriminate
killings described by Professor William Stanley of the University of New Mexico
as a strategy of mass murder” designed to terrorize the civilian population as
well as opponents of the government.

Since 1983, the living standards of all Salvadorans, other
than the privileged, declined to subsistence level. Most people don't have
access to clean water or healthcare. The armed forces are feared, inflation is
at 40%, capital flight is in the billions, and the economic elites pay no
taxes. The US gives El Salvador billions in economic assistance. The aid is distributed
to urban businesses; the impoverished majority receive nothing. The
concentration of wealth is even higher than before the U.S.-administered land
reform program. Agrarian laws generate windfall profits for the economic elites
and buries cooperatives in debts leaving them incapable of competing in the
capital markets.

Of those who fled or were displaced by El Salvador’s
state-sponsored, US financed genocide, thousands reside in makeshift refugee
centers on the Honduran border in conditions of poverty, starvation and
disease.

Guatemala

In 1954, the democratically elected Guatemalan government
of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán was toppled by a CIA
initiated coup d’etat. Claiming a communist insurgency, the Eisenhower
administration armed, trained and organized the Guatemalan coup. The directors
of the United Fruit Company had convinced the Eisenhower administration that President
Arbenz Guzman intended to align Guatemala with the Soviet Bloc.
In reality the Arbenz government’s agrarian reform legislation and new Labor
Code threatened the United Fruit Company ability to grab land and utilize
forced labor. President Guzman’s land reform included the expropriation of 40%
of the United Fruit Company’s land. U.S. foreign policy involving murder and
corruption was implemented to further the United Fruit Company’s goal of profit
and greed.

Honduras

Elected as a liberal, Manuel Zelaya shifted to the political
left during his presidency by forging an alliance with ALBA, an intergovernmental
organization promoting the social, political and economic integration of Latin
American and Caribbean countries. On 28 June 2009, during a
constitutional crisis, the military staged a coup d’etat, seizing President Zelaya and deporting him to Costa Rica.
All efforts to return President Zelya to office by the Organization of American
States were blocked by the Obama administration. De facto President Roberto
Micheletti ordered a curfew that initially lasted for the 48 hours, but he arbitrarily
extends the curfew against his political opponents for months. During the
extended “curfew” civil liberties are abolished.

In the aftermath of the coup, Honduras becomes a major stop
for drug traffickers. Though many experts have said that Honduras has gotten
markedly worse since the ouster democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya,
the Obama administration praises the coup government for its ‘war on drugs’. However,
corruption in Honduras is rampant. The fallout of that coup continues today.

After ousting President Zelaya, the Micheletti government
sent the army and police into the streets to arrest, beat and kill protesters.
According to an official truth commission, Micheletti’s thugs were responsible
for at least 20 deaths in the coup’s immediate aftermath. Edgardo Valeriano, a
medical doctor and researcher, had never been political. But after the coup, he
joined protests demanding democracy and Zelaya's return. Like many protesters,
he was beaten. His skull was split open by batons and police lashed him with
chains. Valeriano says he feels like Honduras went back to the 1980s.

For more than a century, the U.S. government has had
significant influence in Honduras, from the era of U.S.-owned banana plantations,
to military and economic ties that endure today. Because of that history, the
U.S. response to the 2009 coup carried a lot of weight.

Fulton Armstrong, a former CIA analyst who worked as a
senior staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the coup. He said that "… when you look at what was
actually happening in Honduras, [Zelaya continuing] a halting but definitely
forward-moving consolidation of democracy." The coup pushed Honduras to
where it is today: the world's most violent nation, according to the U.N.
“The coup’s legacy of murders and repression of coup opponents, campesinos, and
journalists is partly a legacy of the U.S. government’s response to the coup,
which it consistently supported,” says Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research
in Washington DC.. “If the U.S. had demanded the reinstatement of
Honduras’ democratic government, instead of undermining
this goal at the OAS and other forums, the outcome would have been
very different.” Instead, the U.S. continues to increase funding to
Honduras’ notoriously corrupt security forces, despite the protests of many
members of the U.S. Congress.

“The escalating ‘war on drugs’ in Honduras is another legacy
of the coup,” Weisbrot noted. “It is questionable whether we would see the kind
of incidents under Zelaya or his party as occurred on May 11, when pregnant
women and children were shot dead from U.S. State Department-owned
helicopters, with U.S. DEA agents on board. The coup has led to the breakdown
of many of Honduras’ key institutions, including its police forces and judiciary,
where corruption and abuses are increasingly rampant."